When War Is Just Another Day in Afghanistan

8 minute read

With at least 20% of Afghanistan still in the hands of a resurgent Taliban, the longest war in American history is far from over. Last week, President Barack Obama announced he would prolong the nation’s presence into the country well into 2017 with 8,400 troops expected to remain by the time he leaves office.

The news didn’t make front pages, but for Andrew Quilty, who’s been photographing the conflict from Kabul for the past three years, the world’s attention is essential. “Despite arguably good intentions, the 14-year international intervention in Afghanistan has been largely disastrous for all involved,” he tells TIME. “The international community shouldn’t be allowed to just walk away and forget Afghanistan.”

Quilty, who hails from Australia, one of the many countries that joined Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, feels “somewhat responsible,” he says, for pushing out information to the world. In recent weeks, he’s visited some of Afghanistan’s more unstable regions, including Helmand.

Ahead of a retrospective of his work from Afghanistan that will go on show at the Visa pour l’Image festival [the exhibition is curated by the writer of this article] in September, Quilty explains why he’s committed to this story.

Olivier Laurent: Why go back to Helmand considering the security situation?

Andrew Quilty: In Afghanistan, come spring, attention invariably turns to the south; particularly Helmand — one of the Taliban’s firmest strongholds. That being the case it’s no coincidence that Helmand is also home to the world’s largest opium crop, the lucrative harvest of which comes during April each year. Following the harvest comes the Taliban’s inevitable “spring offensive” and the ensuing fighting season. The timing is isn’t arbitrary. It coincides with the thick vegetation afforded by spring, and a freshly bulging war-chest.

The first two times I visited this Spring were spent with writer colleagues (also my housemates in Kabul) traveling to several frontlines within an hour or two of Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital. With attrition and desertion rates as high as 30% among Afghan security forces, we wanted to see what life was really like for the soldiers manning these frontlines in the country’s most hotly contested province. Secondly, we wanted to gauge how vulnerable Lashkar Gah was. After a major Taliban offensive in December 2015 that had government forces fighting from the city gates, many were predicting its fall come spring.

It was during these trips that I was struck by just how close some of the frontlines were to the capital, and how regularly fighting would erupt. While few military commanders would allow us to stay overnight (when most of the fighting occurs), from the hotel dining room (where we’re often the only guests) we’d see tracer rounds arc above the horizon and hear the thump of artillery and mortars from areas we’d been hours earlier, sometimes less than a half hour drive away. Yet — at least on the surface — Lashkar Gah’s residents appeared to be oblivious.

I think it’s a common misconception about war zones — that all there is is war. In Lashkar Gah, while the war has harmed the economy — resulting in an uptick in crime — and a generally diminished quality of life, bakeries still open before dawn, children continue going to school and boys play sports on dusty fields each afternoon. Even with the war on its doorstep, as clichéd as it sounds, life goes on.

But it’s not quite as simple as that.

Olivier Laurent: What’s the situation there? Why is it important to document what’s happening in Afghanistan in general and Helmand in particular?

Andrew Quilty: Like much of the country, Helmand is becoming increasingly risky to travel to, especially outside the provincial capital. This, combined with the gradual decrease in interest in Afghanistan, means that very few journalists are traveling outside Kabul, to places like Helmand, even compared to one or two years ago. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main one, I believe, is that news organizations rarely think the demand for information from these places justifies the risk of commissioning reporting anymore.

On the one hand, I understand that the proximity/empathy scale that news organizations work off no longer warrants the risks that, in the case of Afghanistan, were routinely taken when over 100,000 American soldiers were here. On the other hand, having been in Afghanistan a few years now, I feel somewhat responsible for pushing out information so that the international community doesn’t forget about it. Despite arguably good intentions, the 14-year international intervention in Afghanistan has been largely disastrous for all involved. The international community shouldn’t be allowed to just walk away and forget Afghanistan.

Why Helmand though? From an international audience’s perspective: since 2001, Helmand has been a major epicenter of the war. More international soldiers were killed there than anywhere else in the country. It was the breeding ground for the insurgency, and now, the majority of the province is either controlled or contested by the Taliban. Helmand is symbolic of the failure of the international combat mission, anti-narcotics and anti-corruption initiatives, counter-insurgency strategy and international development projects.

From a domestic perspective, Helmand represents the conservative, ethnic Pashtun heartland and the Taliban’s support base. It symbolizes successive national governments’ inability to thwart corruption and to reconcile ideological differences between the tribes, factions and long-established patronage networks.

Olivier Laurent: Your photos show a sort of parallel state of affairs, where war seems to have become a normal part of life.

Andrew Quilty: It’s true, Helmandis are inured to war. There’d be very few who have experienced sustained peace in their lifetimes. That’s not to say they accept it; it’s more like they’re resigned to it. I get the sense that the people in Helmand are exhausted by war. It’s a constant. Nowadays, not even the winter months bring respite from the fighting the way it did a few years ago.

Young boys climb a broken-down Ferris Wheel in order to give a friend a quarter of a revolution ride, in a dilapidated playground in the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah.
Young boys climb a broken-down Ferris Wheel in order to give a friend a quarter of a revolution ride, in a dilapidated playground in the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah.Andrew Quilty

And yes, you see the war’s effect on what should be normal life. In a dilapidated amusement park by the Helmand River, I watched a young man climbing the outer struts of a long-neglected ferris wheel. His weight was enough to give two young boys a quarter revolution in one of the gondolas. Another man approached and lamented how the ferris wheel would never turn of its own accord again; investment, even in the capital, he said, had all but ceased. There was too much risk that infrastructure would be destroyed in the event that Lashkar Gah was overrun by the Taliban, as had happened only months before in Kunduz, in the north of the country.

Olivier Laurent: You’ve committed a lot of the last few years to Afghanistan. Why?

Andrew Quilty: It’s hard to put a finger on what keeps me here. It can be an incredibly frustrating and difficult place to work and live. As a photographer, it’s the best and the worst country I’ve ever tried to photograph because you have to let so many things you see — often from a car window — go by, because, for one reason or another, it’s not safe to stop and be seen. Similarly it’s often not advisable to be out at dusk or after dark, which means driving through the beautiful “golden hours” to get home rather than working amidst them, which has always been one of my favorite parts of the job. Furthermore, there are cultural impediments to photographing women, half the country is too dangerous to even contemplate accessing, and perhaps most frustratingly, documenting the other side of the conflict — the Taliban side — is almost entirely out of the question as a foreigner.

Read next: The Story Behind the Haunting Photo of a Starving Afghan Boy

I suppose that says a lot about the reasons for committing to Afghanistan. It really comes down to the fact that I’ve found immense meaning and purpose in what I’ve been able to do here. It’s hard to point a camera in any direction without it coming upon a scene that has depth beyond the physical and the aesthetic, which I now feel, is much of what my earlier work was about. Having said that, I do find Afghanistan absurdly photogenic as well, and so combining these two elements makes for an undeniably compelling environment for a photojournalist.

Finally, and this is something that has begun to weigh heavily in recent weeks — particularly after the death of David Gilkey — there is a sense of responsibility to stick-it-out as interest in Afghanistan wanes. Having said that, and even considering that the country is becoming increasingly difficult to work in, it’d be hypocritical for me not to have to seriously wrestle with the prospect of leaving, if and when the time comes.

Andrew Quilty is an Australian photographer based in Kabul. His show, After Enduring Freedom, will go on show at the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan, France, from Aug. 27 to Sept. 11, 2016.

Olivier Laurent is the editor of TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @olivierclaurent

Lashkar Gah
An Afghan National Policeman, wearing a red rose, at a road check point in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand in southern Afghanistan. Lashkar Gah came under serious threat of being overrun in late 2015 with Taliban insurgents mounting attacks from several locations outside the city. The city remains tense with the surrounding districts contested or under the control of the Taliban and with a bloody fighting season expected still to come.Andrew Quilty
Members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), one climbing a ladder to keep watch over adjacent fields across which Taliban have conducted raids, inside an ALP outpost in the Sayedabad area of Helmand's Nadali District. Taliban-controlled villages are only a few hundred metres away. After years of relative calm in Nadali District, the ALP, with the support of the Afghan National Army (ANA), are now maintaining the tenuous frontline against the ever-encroaching Taliban who have pushed closer than ever to the nearby Provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in recent months. The ALP are between a rock and a hard place - unable to lay down their arms because of the immediate proximity of Taliban fighters but under-equipped to provide adequate protection for the villages they protect and call home.
Members of the Afghan Local Police (ALP), one climbing a ladder to keep watch over adjacent fields across which Taliban have conducted raids, inside an ALP outpost in the Sayedabad area of Helmand's Nadali District. Taliban-controlled villages are only a few hundred metres away. After years of relative calm in Nadali District, the ALP, with the support of the Afghan National Army (ANA), are now maintaining the tenuous frontline against the ever-encroaching Taliban who have pushed closer than ever to the nearby Provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in recent months. The ALP are between a rock and a hard place - unable to lay down their arms because of the immediate proximity of Taliban fighters but under-equipped to provide adequate protection for the villages they protect and call home.Andrew Quilty
Young students in a classroom with no teacher at the Sayedabad-area school in Helmand's Nadali District. The school is currently operating with Afghan National Army soldiers positioned on its roof, with a diminished number of students and teachers and with the sound of fighting regularly audible nearby. Taliban-controlled villages are only a couple of hundred metres away. After years of relative calm in Nadali District, the ALP, with the support of the Afghan National Army (ANA), are now maintaining the tenuous frontline against the ever-encroaching Taliban who have pushed closer than ever to the nearby Provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in recent months. The ALP are between a rock and a hard place - unable to lay down their arms because of the immediate proximity of Taliban fighters but under-equipped to provide adequate protection for the villages they protect and call home.
Young students in a classroom with no teacher at the Sayedabad-area school in Helmand's Nadali District. The school is currently operating with Afghan National Army soldiers positioned on its roof, with a diminished number of students and teachers and with the sound of fighting regularly audible nearby. Taliban-controlled villages are only a couple of hundred metres away. After years of relative calm in Nadali District, the ALP, with the support of the Afghan National Army (ANA), are now maintaining the tenuous frontline against the ever-encroaching Taliban who have pushed closer than ever to the nearby Provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, in recent months. The ALP are between a rock and a hard place - unable to lay down their arms because of the immediate proximity of Taliban fighters but under-equipped to provide adequate protection for the villages they protect and call home.Andrew Quilty
The oldest worker at Lashkar Gah's marble factory puts the finishing touches on desktop ornaments. He worked at the factory as a teenager. The vast majority of marble comes from territory currently controlled by the Taliban. It is alleged that wholesalers pay fees to the insurgent group in order to maintain their supply, even though most is sold across the border in Pakistan.
The oldest worker at Lashkar Gah's marble factory puts the finishing touches on desktop ornaments. He worked at the factory as a teenager. The vast majority of marble comes from territory currently controlled by the Taliban. It is alleged that wholesalers pay fees to the insurgent group in order to maintain their supply, even though most is sold across the border in Pakistan.Andrew Quilty
A member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) who has been wounded several times in fighting in recent years, rests inside a small ALP base on the Gereshk District  (Helmand Province) frontline with the Taliban. The small base, manned by 8-10 men is attacked regularly. In the days before this photograph was taken two ALP were shot and killed while others were wounded in a nighttime ambush by Taliban fighters. The ALP in the base complained of a lack of equipment to fight the Taliban. They seemed resigned to one day being overrun.
A member of the Afghan Local Police (ALP) who has been wounded several times in fighting in recent years, rests inside a small ALP base on the Gereshk District (Helmand Province) frontline with the Taliban. The small base, manned by 8-10 men is attacked regularly. In the days before this photograph was taken two ALP were shot and killed while others were wounded in a nighttime ambush by Taliban fighters. The ALP in the base complained of a lack of equipment to fight the Taliban. They seemed resigned to one day being overrun.Andrew Quilty
After lunch at a popular restaurant in Lashkar Gah, a guest fits his prosthetic leg before departing with friends.
After lunch at a popular restaurant in Lashkar Gah, a guest fits his prosthetic leg before departing with friends.Andrew Quilty
Helmand
Bakers at work in at sunrise in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan during a period of relative calm as the region's vast poppy crop is harvested.Andrew Quilty
Lashkar Gah
A young sheep herder and a man selling tea from a "samovar" at a regular Friday livestock bazaar in Lashkar Gah. Despite fears over deteriorating security following the Taliban's near successful attempt at pushing into the Helmand capital late in 2015, the weekly livestock bazaar attracts thousands of buyers and sellers from near and far.Andrew Quilty
Helmand
Afghan National Policemen rest and smoke cigarettes inside an isolated check point that sits less than 200 feet from a compound under Taliban control in Chah-e Anjir, a less than 30 minute drive from the center of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province in souther Afghanistan. In the last month 3 men have been killed at the check point and several more wounded. Andrew Quilty for The New York TimesAndrew Quilty
Lashkar Gah
Boys and young men take in the last of the day by the Helmand River in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. Lashkar Gah came under serious threat of being overrun in late 2015 with Taliban insurgents mounting attacks from several locations outside the city. The city remains tense with the surrounding districts contested or under the control of the Taliban and with a bloody fighting season expected still to come.Andrew Quilty
Young boys climb a broken-down Ferris Wheel in order to give a friend a quarter of a revolution ride, in a dilapidated playground in the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah.
Young boys climb a broken-down Ferris Wheel in order to give a friend a quarter of a revolution ride, in a dilapidated playground in the capital of Helmand Province, Lashkar Gah.Andrew Quilty
Helmand
At an Afghan government checkpoint an Afghan National Policeman stands on a mud roof - a sentry position that looks across to Taliban controlled areas in Babaji, 10 miles northwest of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province. The area is one of several skirting Lashkar Gah that are now front lines against the Taliban, since the insurgent group was halted in its advance on the capital late in 2015. The men posted to this particular checkpoint have seen fighting most days in recent times. Andrew Quilty for The New York TimesAndrew Quilty

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